Author: Steve Feyer

How a Talent Intelligence Platform Improves D&I to Deliver a Stronger Bottom Line

Mercer and Red Thread Research recently released an in-depth report detailing the current state of the diversity and inclusion (D&I) technology market[1]. While many organizations recognize the need for improving D&I, many fewer understand the business case for implementing these programs. This document provides an excellent overview of why D&I delivers solid business results, as well as a thorough exploration of technology solutions to help make it happen.

D&I technology providers range from early-stage innovators to enterprise-level consulting groups with international scale. They all have one thing in common: a technological approach to improving D&I based on tools that remove overt, innate, and behavioral biases from talent management.

Analysis within the report covers a wide range of D&I technologies, centered around four broad categories:

Talent Acquisition

Development/Advancement

Engagement/Retention

Analytics

Embedding Diversity into the Talent Lifecycle

At the same time, the report’s function-by function approach raises a question: how many of the technologies included within these four categories can solve multiple issues, helping reduce the number of overlapping products and services an organization needs to meet its D&I goals?

For example, a Talent Intelligence Platform like the one provided by Eightfold supports all four of this report’s categories. The same masking tools and AI-based focus on skills and career trajectory that make Eightfold a superior tool for building top-end talent funnels also directly impact the rest of the employee experience.

Restless or unchallenged employees gain the ability to explore other jobs within their organization, including descriptions of the skills needed to make that next career move. Hiring managers who open job postings to internal applicants use the same screening tools to help foster internal talent while protecting the privacy of internal applicants.

On the engagement and retention front, HR receives feedback on employees who might be flight risks due to expanded skillsets or delayed career advancement. Early identification helps the organization recognize at-risk talent and take pre-emptive steps to keep them challenged.

The Talent Intelligence Platform also delivers a unifying function across other systems, aligning ATS and HR applications as well as its own data resources. This cross-platform/cross-department capability makes it far easier to generate the analytics and reporting that’s essential to document D&I initiative progress.

In short, while current D&I solutions already deliver tremendous value, consolidation of functionality is the next step in D&I technology’s evolution.

[1] Diversity & Inclusion Technology: The Rise of a Transformative Market, Stacia Sherman Garr and Carole Jackson, RedThread Research and Mercer, February 2019

This year, there has been a big increase in chatter around AI recruiting. Companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to support their hiring needs. But with so many different options and opinions out there, it can be hard to understand what AI recruiting means—and would it could mean for your business and your day-to-day work.

This post answers your basic questions about AI recruiting, so that you can make a knowledgeable decision about whether to consider a solution for hiring with AI.

What Is AI Recruiting?

AI recruiting is any technology that uses artificial intelligence to support one or more aspects of the recruiting process (intake, sourcing, engagement, scheduling, evaluation, etc.). These tasks can be made more efficient and more accurate with AI recruiting compared to manual efforts and older generations of technology.

For example, an intake meeting between a recruiting lead and the hiring manager is prone to miscommunication. Hiring managers often feel that recruiting business partners do not understand their needs, while the recruiters will say hiring managers don’t explain themselves clearly enough. An AI recruiting tool can offer a common reference point for both individuals, enabling them to do their work together faster and more effectively.

In some cases, AI recruiting can take the place of manual effort. For example, if the AI can automatically locate enough qualified candidates for most roles, then there is less need for recruiters to find talent individually. In other cases, AI supplements individual work to make it better. With AI providing more insight about each candidate, time can be spent more effectively on candidate engagement—perhaps giving a valuable new role to talent acquisition professionals who no longer need to spend all their time scrolling through resumes.

Why Would My Company Need AI Recruiting?

Your company needs AI recruiting if it needs to hire or retain staff regularly, and if you’re large enough to have dedicated recruiters. So if you work for a company today, chances are that your company needs AI recruiting.

You may be thinking that “need” is a very strong word—isn’t AI recruiting just an option to consider? The fact is, AI recruiting is quickly moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have because of the value it offers.

Suppose your company takes an average of 45 days from job opening to making the first offer. Your competitor faces the exact same market for talent you do, but if they have AI recruiting, they may only need 30 days to make an offer. Companies with AI recruiting are able to move faster to hire, and their competitors that lack this technology will be left behind in the war for talent.

Who Benefits from AI Recruiting?

In short, everyone benefits from AI recruiting.

Hiring managers will interview better-fit candidates and, on average, fill their job openings faster. Even if they never interact directly with any AI recruiting technology, hiring managers benefit from it.

Recruiters will source full pipelines of qualified people much faster, so they can spend more of their time engaging, encouraging, and advancing great candidates rather than scrolling through endless lists of resumes, or clicking through tedious workflows. AI doesn’t replace human recruiters—it makes them better.

Human resources will benefit because they can coach employees based on real data regarding skills, career progressions, and opportunities. Internal mobility is enabled in a fundamentally new way.

Not least of all, candidates benefit when companies use AI recruiting. The technology enables these companies to communicate faster and more usefully with candidates. If AI is deployed directly on a career site, candidates can match themselves to their best-fit jobs without frustrating searches or applying to dozens of jobs at once. Candidates from diversity categories can especially benefit from AI recruiting, because this technology removes sources of unconscious bias that impact these candidates negatively.

When Should I Consider AI Recruiting?

There’s no bad time to get started recruiting with AI. Since an AI recruiter will achieve benefits and savings of multiple times its cost, sooner is always better. However, there are specific times when it will make even more sense to consider this technology.

If you can foresee a large expansion in hiring needs a few quarters away, then now is a good time to invest in AI recruiting. You will be ready to scale your hiring when the time comes. If your company has significant university recruiting strategies, then add AI recruiting in time for the campus hiring season.

If your industry is becoming competitive for talent, with companies attracting key staff from other firms, then AI recruiting is a strong response to the competition in your market. You’ll gain a durable leg up on your competitors for attracting, hiring, and retaining the people you need. (If your competitor already has AI recruiting, then your need is indeed urgent.)

When your existing recruiting technology investments are up for renewal, that is an excellent time to consider AI recruiting as the natural evolution of your technology strategy.

Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a necessary part of your company’s hiring process. Without an ATS, you could not manage a large volume of applications, track each individual through the correct hiring process through on boarding, or ensure compliance with legal requirements.

An ATS is necessary, but it may not be sufficient to support all your hiring needs—especially if your company still needs to hire more people, hire faster, hire at lower cost, or improve diversity. Needs like this are better met with a Talent Intelligence Platform.

Once you have both a Talent Intelligence Platform and an ATS, there is further value in connecting these two technologies with two-way syncing. Here are five reasons to connect your ATS system to a Talent Intelligence Platform.

1. You can search your ATS

Applicant Tracking Systems are most important for standardizing business process and maintaining records. While they perform these functions very well, they are not ideal for searching the ATS database to discover new talent.

As your ATS database grows, potentially to millions of candidate records, it can become difficult to locate talent within the system. Keyword-based and Boolean searches work poorly against candidate data. Unless you know the name of a specific person whose record you wish to find, your ATS search will probably fail.

By connecting your ATS to a Talent Intelligence Platform, your existing database is accessible to the superior search capabilities of the Talent Intelligence Platform: fast indexing, ranking, and context driven by AI. The AI-driven Platform becomes the best way to interact with your ATS data.

2. You can update ATS candidate profiles automatically

Applicant Tracking Systems only contain the data that candidates have provided about themselves, and that recruiters and hiring managers have entered about the candidates. At the conclusion of the hiring cycle for a given candidate, the data is no longer refreshed.

This reality creates a challenge if your company ever wishes to recruit past candidates. Your information on a candidate’s contact information, location, current employer, skills, and professional interests quickly goes out of date.

When your ATS is connected to a Talent Intelligence Platform, the Platform’s profile for your candidate can be automatically kept current with publicly available data. You will be able to stay in touch, and remain relevant, to a larger percentage of your past candidates. And you’ll be able to discover when past candidates might be ready to consider your company again.

3. You can nurture and recruit “silver medalists”

You hire exactly one person for every open position. But chances are, you had at least one other candidate qualified and willing to take the job. The people you didn’t hire would have become great employees, and just didn’t happen to get hired at the time—so wouldn’t you want to employ them in the future?

All the investment of effort that went into recruiting these “silver medalists” is wasted if your company never engages them again. Sadly, that is often what happens. There is no place on a podium for the runner-up for a job—usually, there is only silence. What a waste!

With a Talent Intelligence Platform connected to your ATS, you have a system that’s designed to maintain relationships with the strong performers you might still want to hire in the future. The Talent Intelligence Platform can continually nurture your past candidates, until the day arrives when you will be in a position to recruit them again.

4. You can analyze hiring criteria objectively, and without limitations

Within an ATS, you have very limited ways to evaluate the potential performance of your candidates. Your interview notes are important, but subjective. You can rate candidates using test scores, past companies, years of experience, and other measures, but these are limited to the data you have.

A better and more objective way to evaluate candidates is to use AI-based models, but even if your company has tremendous technical skill to develop these models, you are limited by your data. The world’s largest companies still possess only a tiny fraction of the world’s candidate data.

A Talent Intelligence Platform offers you the ability to use models developed with the world’s intelligence. Connected to your ATS, this Platform can tell you which of your candidates best meet your holistic requirements far more accurately than any other single system or method. As a result, you can define the hiring criteria appropriate to your business and be confident that your eventual hire was considered against those criteria.

5. You can transfer data more easily among ATS and other corporate systems

Your ATS may not be designed to connect with other enterprise systems. If you decide to switch ATS providers, customize new technology, or combine existing systems, you might discover that moving your data is difficult and costly.

A Talent Intelligence Platform, by its nature, is designed to work with other sources of candidate data—ATS especially. Most ATS technologies can be integrated to a Talent Intelligence Platform easily, culminating in a two-way sync in a matter of hours.

Therefore, you can use a Talent Intelligence Platform as a hub of candidate information, bypassing the limitations of ATS data transfers.

All of this new power doesn’t make your ATS less important. On the contrary, it makes your ATS more valuable as a record of everyone your company has ever encountered. ATS integration with a Talent Intelligence Platform unlocks value.

Spending all that investor cash is just as hard as raising it. Many companies fail when they can’t get enough talent to execute their vision—because they thought great people would rush in to fill all their new jobs.

You need to think about your hiring strategies as seriously as your product and go-to-market strategies. Here are four important considerations as you prepare to scale your team.

Four Important Considerations to Scale Your Team

1. Don’t Expect the Old Methods to Work

Things were different back when your team all fit in one room. You had just a few openings at a time, and you could usually fill them from the networks of your team, your advisors, and your investors. You could post your needs to Y Combinator’s monthly thread and get great people.

But these methods don’t scale. Now you need dozens or hundreds of great people, including experts in whole new specialties. You need to think about hiring at scale, with tools and processes that can support the volume you are building toward.

Continue to encourage referrals and network hires, as they can provide some of your most motivated and capable talent. But don’t expect these methods to give you everyone you need.

2. Set Yourself Apart with a Winning Employer Brand

To hire hundreds, you’ll quickly invest in “employer branding”. Typically, that will include a video-heavy career site featuring your cool offices, your team members in branded t-shirts, and long lists of perks. You’ll send teams to job fairs and buy advertising on career websites.

All that stuff is good—but it’s severely inadequate. Your employer brand is what your eventually job candidates think of you, and ultimately that’s driven not by what you say. It’s driven by how you treat your candidates.

All your efforts will draw in great applications from great people who are also applying to companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix. These big brands will be responsive and personal with their top talent. If you want to cultivate the same people, you need to be even more responsive and more personal.

So if the other companies are moving from application to offer in 10 days, you’ll need to find a way to do it in 8 days and beat them to the punch. This overlooked aspect of your employer brand cannot be overstated: It’s the key to actually getting your team filled.

3. Enable Your Recruiters and Hiring Managers

You have to hire a recruiting team, maybe for the first time. Your recruiters are a lot like your sales people in that their job is to sell your company. Only instead of selling the products, they are selling the open jobs.

You don’t want your sales people spending all their time on low-value activities, like updating their opportunities or dialing phones over and over. So you’ve invested in automation to track their activities appropriately while leaving them the most possible freedom to sell.

Treat your recruiters the same way from the beginning. Enable them with processes and tools that maximize the time they have to engage with talent personally, and let software do the repetitive stuff.

4. Embrace Non-Traditional Talent

Now that your recruiting team is on board, your brand is established, and you are working fast to close the people you want, everything should run smoothly—right? Nope! The job market is still working against you.

Rarely has there been a harder time to hire, especially in booming markets like Silicon Valley, New York, Los Angeles, and London. The qualified people you find first are also being recruited by a dozen other credible companies.

So even though you’re in the best possible position to win over popular talent, you still won’t hire enough without approaching the people who are being overlooked. These great workers are all around you.

They are career switchers and stay-at-home moms returning to the workforce. They are suburbanites who left the big city and immigrants who just arrived. They are the hard workers who taught themselves to code. All these brilliant people have the right skills, but they may be hard to find.

You need a way to identify people by their ability to do the job, not their ability to stand out from a crowd. Then, finally, you’ll have a complete, capable, and motivated team for every position.

Recruit Better with Talent Intelligence

Scaling up your team won’t be easy. In a recent survey, big-company executives said they would not be able to fill 28% of their open roles. What chance do you have to fill all your roles competing with these goliaths?

When we started asking our customers, colleagues, and friends for their book recommendations, we turned up… a lot of disappointment. It turns out that many people feel burned by books about talent and HR.

These typical talent-related books offer a self-help approach similar to any number of lifestyle publications. At best, their advice focuses on how to do better with the tools you’ve been given. There’s surprisingly little information about how talent acquisition and talent management technologies need to evolve to generate timely, usable results. They haven’t been updated since ATS, CRM, and Talent Intelligence Platform technologies hit the market.

So we’ve focused on 10 titles that current professionals can really use. These books offer relevant, up-to-date, practical advice. And not one of our friends had read them all!

10 Top Books for Recruiters and Human Resources

Who – The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. The typical hiring success rate for managers is only 50%. Who – The A Method for Hiring builds on 1,300 hours of interview with billionaires and CEOs to reveal how to avoid hiring the wrong person and quickly reach the A players your organization needs to succeed.

Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business, by Rusty Reuff and Hank Stringer. One thing separates your company from the competition: the people who work for you. Talent Force identifies how to hire the right talent, in the right place, and at the right time to maximize the impact of the people who run your business.

The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, by Lou Adler. What does performance-based hiring mean for hiring managers as well as job applicants? Lou Adler, long a legend in the talent acquisition world, delivers common-sense advice to get the people your organization needs through a structured process with consistent, replicable results across your business.

Hire with Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Great Teams, by Lou Adler. The classic guide to performance-based hiring is recently updated with case studies and analyses of the Internet’s impact on the hiring process. Adler’s guide explains the foundational thinking underlying much of today’s current hiring practices.

First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. You can’t innovate, disrupt, or grow by doing what everyone else is doing. This book discovers what great managers do differently, and when they know they have to disregard conventional wisdom – including how they hire talent and promote staff.

Hire the Best and Avoid the Rest, by Michael Mercer. This book lays out tools and techniques for ethical interviewing, testing, and checking references. An evergeen resource, this book helps hiring managers learn how to use their time and communications with job candidates more effectively to capture the qualities that reveal the right people to hire.

Make Your People Before You Make Your Products, by Paul Turner and Danny Kaufman. When your people increasingly are your competitive advantage, managing talent becomes essential. This practice-based philosophy toward hiring details a flexible, dynamic, and inclusive approach to talent management, designed to help organizations move beyond traditional but ineffective linear approaches.

Talent Management Handbook, by Lance A. Berger and Dorothy R. Berger. This handbook is an established how-to guide for HR professionals and hiring managers. The new edition builds on the latest developments in hiring and talent acquisition to provide a roadmap based on business culture for a comprehensive approach to talent management.

Reinventing Talent Management: How to Maximize Performance in the New Marketplace, by William A. Schiemann. Businesses build equity in their people, just as much as with as their processes, physical plants, products, and services. Reinventing Talent Management explains how to understand and structure talent, using it as a strategic element within the organization rather than treating it as an intangible impossible to convert into measurable action.

The Human Capital Edge: 21 People Management Practices Your Company Must Implement (Or Avoid) To Maximize Shareholder Value, by Bruce N. Pfau and Ira T. Kay. Which human capital practices work in the real world? This detailed book, based on research from 25 human capital management practices, shows not just which approaches work regarding talent management but also how they impact the stock price of a company, among other critical measures of corporate success.

The end of the fiscal year is approaching for many companies. As a budget owner, you may be in the enviable position of having more budget than you need. It sounds like a result to celebrate—but it comes with a risk.

In many organizations, carrying unspent budget to the end of the year will result in your budget being cut next year. You met your goals at lower cost than expected. You hired effective team members and ran a tight ship, so why should you be penalized?

Better would be to use the budget you have left. Doing this will protect your budget for next year, but the easiest temptations for how to spend this money come with risks.

Don’t do more of the same—and create a “sugar high”. One option would be simply to spend more on your existing programs. Suppose for example that you spend a monthly amount on talent advertising. You could raise spending by the amount of your remaining budget, which would also raise the results of these programs. But the improvement would not be as much as expected, because of the law of diminishing returns—and anyway, since you’ve hit your targets with your existing spending, these results wouldn’t create a great impact. When this “sugar high” fades, your successful baseline won’t feel as good as it used to.

Don’t pull ahead payments—and put yourself at risk. You could seek to pay providers out of this year’s budget for services that you’ll use next year. Seems like an easy solution… but it could carry great personal risk, especially in a regulated or a public company. Keeping your books this way could be considered fraudulent depending on the details—and at the very least, would be viewed as irregular.

Don’t start programs early—and reduce their impact. If pulling ahead payments isn’t a good idea, how about pulling ahead the programs themselves? This would remove the accounting risk, and replace it with a business risk. Starting programs early will disconnect them from the purpose for which they were originally planned, and could pull them out of alignment with related efforts from other departments, making them less effective. You’ll likely end up with a program that doesn’t meet its targets, and so you’ll end up needing to spend more overall on the program than you would have otherwise. (And if the program is effective, you’ve just shifted your budget surplus to next year, repeating the same problem!)

Don’t hand it out—and create bad incentives. Rewarding your employees with extra bonuses is a very tempting way to use excess budget. To be sure, providing a token of thanks is appropriate. However, if your team learns that they will be able to keep any surplus, you will probably give them the wrong idea. Next year they may cut corners to save money, hurting your results to give themselves more pay. This reality is a key reason why headcount budgets and expense budgets are tracked separately to begin with.

What you should do: Make a strategic investment

The best way to use your leftover budget is to invest in something that will pay dividends later. Make a strategic purchase that improves your results next year, without disrupting existing initiatives and plans. You want an investment that targets C-level initiatives. You want to make a decision that says: “Not only did I take care of company resources, I am thinking about the long-term and the needs of everyone here.”

We heard many interesting predictions about what’s next for the world of work. Here are six of our favorites:

Automation is a key trend in virtually every industry and career. Automated machines, both physical robots and software, will handle an ever-increasing share of work. But this trend does not eliminate the need for people—even highly automated machines ar-Workforcee still tools, and there will never be a robot-owned company. Those workers who can function alongside automation, at every skill level, will fill the jobs of the future.

With more automation, there will be more of a burden of responsibility on individuals to know how to operate their tools correctly—partly due to a reduction in human oversight, and partly because each person can do much more when supported by a growing number of automated machines. So what skills will workers need for jobs managing fleets of robots? The growing focus on STEM education is very important, but not everyone needs an engineering degree in order to hold down a job. More generally, students should learn about formal logic systems to understand how their machines operate, how to troubleshoot them, and how improve their productivity.

The growth in automation is often seen as a threat to jobs, particularly low-skill jobs. While this is an important concern, history suggests cause for optimism. ATMs created more banking jobs. Self-service retail created more call center jobs. Human demands are endless, and automation will not cause permanent joblessness any more than any other era of industrial history. As during these earlier periods, the social and political response to automation is of paramount importance.

Whatever students are learning in school, their specific skills will have a shorter shelf life than ever. Virtually no worker will have a 40-year-or-longer career that requires no change in skills. More than particular skills, students must learn how to learn throughout their lives.

Companies will become ever more aware of the impact of bias, and of the limitations that “traditional” credentials and sources of talent have for increasing diversity. With this new realization, companies will spend more effort on nurturing their talent pools, creating new talent pools, retraining, and educational mission. There is less a shortage of talent than a shortage of imagination.

As teams grow more globally dispersed, workers will collaborate across cultures more than ever. They will need skills and sensitivity, but also good tools such as high-quality video and real-time machine translation. Cross-cultural opportunities—like those that Cultural Vistas has fostered over its 55-year history, are becoming more essential than ever before.

What can you do in 4 hours? At the office, there’s probably not a lot you can get finished in half a day: You can have a few meetings, give several interviews, maybe write a report. Or you could add a powerful Talent Intelligence Platform to your Greenhouse Applicant Tracking System (ATS), and gain new capabilities you never had before.

We’re partnering with Greenhouse because we agree that finding talented people is too hard today. The combination of Greenhouse ATS and the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform is making every aspect of talent management better for our customers.

Here are four reasons why Eightfold and Greenhouse are great together:

We both work to give our customers a competitive advantage. Greenhouse optimizes recruiting operations for better interviews and more impactful hiring decisions. Eightfold reveals new sources of talent and new insights for faster hiring and greater retention. Results for our joint customers include 25% lower attrition, 60% lower cost-to-hire, and 80% faster time-to-interview.

Greenhouse offers a popular ATS that captures every applicant for efficient hiring. For all the applicants who aren’t hired, Eightfold enables our customers to consider them for future roles. The combination of our platforms gives our joint customers an efficient way to grow their teams and build their employer brand.

Greenhouse, like us, believes in the importance of building inclusive teams, and in particular addressing the problem of unconscious bias. People mean well, but some of our biases can’t be eliminated without help from technology. With features like targeted outreach, profile masking, and blind screening, Eightfold is removing unconscious bias leading to measurable improvements in hiring of underrepresented groups.

Software shouldn’t take months and months just to get up and running. In this spirit, the integration of Greenhouse and Eightfold is fast and easy, and takes about half a day.